The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for producing a food product shaped like a shellfish, and for applying a coloring simulating the natural color of the product.
It is known in the prior art to make a simulated shellfish, such as shrimp, crab claws, lobster and abalone, from a fish paste. For example, a paste of ground fish meat has been formed into a flat sheet, cut into thin bar-like shapes gathered together and cooked, and colored to form bars having the appearance of crab legs. This type of technology is described in Japanese patent provisional publication No. 60-180564 laid open Sept. 14, 1985 and in our copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 769,175 filed Aug. 26, 1985.
To color the surface of such a bar-shaped food product with a red food coloring to reproduce the natural color of the real crab, it has been common practise to wrap the bar-shaped paste in a polyethylene film, the inner side of the film having been coated with a red food coloring, and then boil or steam the product so as to cook and transfer the coloring to the paste.
Although it has been sufficient to simply shape the fish paste into bars or cylinders and cut it into appropriate lengths, up until this invention there has been no method and apparatus for processing ground fish meat in order to produce fish-paste products having the true appearance of the shelled meat of shrimp, crab claws, lobster, and other shellfish.
While the prior art color transfer technique described above is useful in the coloring of bar-shaped products, it cannot be successfully applied to foods having intricate shapes such as simulated shrimps which have joints, for the food coloring cannot be evenly transferred, by the prior art method, to such irregular surfaces to faithfully reproduce the appearance of shrimp and the like.
It is a general object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for forming and coloring a simulated shellfish food product such as a shrimp, a claw of a crab, or the like.